Burn
by Sunlight3146
Summary: What if things had been just a bit different? What if Carlisle had never started the Cullen family? One-shots of each of the characters from the moment of divergence from the 'real' timeline, and how they were all reunited, in the end.


**Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the Twilight saga and its universe. No profit is made here and no offense intended.**

_Carlisle Cullen_

The boy hadn't meant to go to the cellar.

It was an abandoned place, at least during the winter after the potatoes had been harvested but before anyone would buy them or cut up the pieces to plant them, during the few days that spaced each time the boy's mother made meals with the potatoes. The door to the cellar wasn't ever locked, but even if it had been, he would have been able to open it. He was old enough, now, that his father trusted him with the key.

Even though demons, vampires, had attacked only hours ago, the boy was out and about, wandering. He didn't have any close playmates, so he spent most of his free time exploring. That was when he heard the strange sounds coming from the potato cellar. Despite his mother's warnings that someday, his curiosity would get him in trouble, he poked his head through the door, then moved the potatoes that were strangely placed, almost as if they were hiding something.

It was a man.

The boy vaguely recognized him. It was the pastor's son, Carlisle Cullen. He seemed quite kind, he acknowledged the boy when they met in the streets, instead of ignoring him like most grown-ups did. His face was scrunched up as if he was in pain, his clothes were torn, and he seemed to be holding himself back from writhing.

That, though, was secondary to the blood on his body, surrounding horrific wounds. There was no doubt in the boy's mind where those had come from: the vampire demons that had attacked the town.

The man, Carlisle, twitched, and his eyes flew open. The boy screamed, for the once blue eyes of the fair-haired Cullen were now a grotesque, bluish-red.

They didn't tell the pastor that they'd found Carlisle Cullen. No one wanted to force him to give the order, that anything, even Pastor Cullen's son, that was tainted with the devil would have to be burned. As far as Carlisle's father knew, his son's body had never been found.

They burned him. He didn't cry out once, even as his body was consumed by the fire at a faster-than-normal rate, even as when his eyes twitched open to meet those of his murderers. It was a sight that would haunt those men for the rest of their lives.

When Carlisle Cullen was nothing more than ash, when the potatoes clustered around him were burned like the rest of him, they left the cellar, then set fire to the entire structure.

The boy watched it all, unnoticed by the men. He wondered what his family would do, without the potatoes they'd taken all summer to grow.

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_Edward Anthony Masen_

The young man had seen him when they'd taken him in. Another young man, not even out of his teenage years, with strangely metallic red-brown hair and bright green eyes. The gleam in the eyes had faded during the long days and nights the bronze-haired boy had been in the hospital, next to him.

The young man had watched, half delirious, as the boy's mother, a pretty woman with the same green eyes, had fallen ill. They'd taken her to the women's ward. Away from her son. There hadn't been enough physicians and nurses to watch over each patient, and no one had noticed the special bond between the mother and the son, a bond that suggested that they were all the other had left in the world. The young man recognized that look, that bond. He'd had it with his twin sister, before both had gotten the influenza and had been separated. The last time he'd seen her was the time they'd been admitted into the hospital, before they were pulled away. He would never see her again; she died within hours in the crowded women's ward, away from her brother.

The bronze-haired boy was dying, now. The young man recognized the signs, from the countless others he'd seen die from the seemingly unstoppable disease. He hadn't seen the green eyes of the other boy for hours, now. It had been days since the boy had eaten something other than the useless medicines the doctors gave when they checked up on the patients.

The young man saw those eyes, one last time, as the bronze-haired boy opened them and tried to sit up, before he collapsed back into the bed. When the doctors came, the young man didn't need their medical expertise (or lack thereof) for them to proclaim what he already knew. The other man, someone he could have been friends with, in another life, if several zeros didn't separate the two boys' inheritances, was dead.

He couldn't have known that, only minutes before the green eyes had opened, one last time, that the boy's mother had taken her last breath.

The young man ended up getting better. He stood again. Edward Anthony Masen never would.

The bodies of the mother and the son were burned, the ashes scattered in the wilderness outside Chicago, as had been their wishes. Their small fortune went to a cousin in the new city of Las Vegas, Nevada, who sold most of the belongings to pay his debts, from gambling, but it wasn't enough to keep him from going bankrupt. Elizabeth's jewelry ended up in a pawn shop in Las Vegas, gone like she and Edward were. Her wedding ring was destroyed in a shop fire.

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_Esme Ann Platt_

When she was sixteen, she broke her leg climbing a tree No, falling from a tree. The distinction mattered to her, though back then, she hadn't been sure why. When she'd graduated from her high school outside of Columbus, Ohio, when her parents started pushing her to marry, when, four years later, she was engaged to a man she hardly knew, she realized. Climbing the tree hadn't been a bad thing. It wasn't the climb that had hurt her, it was the fall, yet everyone used her broken leg as evidence why she shouldn't have climbed the tree in the first place.

She didn't know exactly how that applied, but she knew what it meant. She couldn't stay in the small town a little outside of Columbus. She couldn't marry Charles Evenson. If she wanted people to listen to her even though she was a woman, if she wanted to get the chance to be who she wanted to be, she had to leave.

And leave she did.

At age twenty-two, carrying only her life savings and a few prized possessions, she took the bus to a college some towns away. A teaching college, because it had always been her dream to teach. She wanted to move west to become a school teacher, but she knew she needed to earn money before she could even hope to journey past Ohio. She excelled in her studies, but was always looking behind her shoulder, for fear that her parents would find her again. They had long ago stopped the search for their daughter, once the funds had run out, once Charles Evenson had gotten engaged to another young lady.

None of it was enough to save her.

She was wandering the streets of the city that surrounded the college, when she was attacked by a serial murderer. She didn't suffer long, thankfully, as the criminal's first victim, but her body was systematically burned after she was dead. The strings of murders with the same MO and signature, following hers, would continue for months until the murderer was finally caught. The police were too late, though, to save the fifteen women he'd killed, including twenty-four-year-old Esme Ann Platt.

Her parents never found out what happened to her.

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_Rosalie Lillian Hale_

Her body was found by a couple sneaking back home from a late-night excursion.

The police had searched for her, late at night, when she hadn't come home after going to her friend Vera's house, but they hadn't found her. It had been too dark, and Rochester was too large of a city to be easily combed through.

The couple had been torn on whether or not to tell the police. The man had thought it too risky, too easy for their families to find out really where they'd been, but the woman had insisted that they had to, for Rosalie Hale's sake, even though no one had really liked the snobby, spoiled girl anyway. In the end, they hadn't had to do anything. An early morning patrol found them. The couple was apprehended, but it became clear that they hadn't had anything to do with the murder, and they were released.

They burned the body and kept the ashes, as was tradition in their family, from a long time ago, and because no one wanted to see the remains of the beautiful girl.

After a suitably long mourning period, the girl's fiancé, Royce King, started courting another girl, just as rich and just as air-headed. That girl ran away once it was clear that she was pregnant. She and Royce hadn't gotten married yet.

Before long, she was forgotten, just another death among the many that populated cities like Rochester. Her family moved on, as did the city. Her younger brothers gradually forgot their sister's purplish eyes and pretty face, her mannerisms and the way her face would light up when she told them stories, all of the things that made her Rose. Just like that, Rosalie Lillian Hale was gone.

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_Emmett McCarthy_

After three days of combing the forests, they found his body.

It was his eldest brother who came across the mangled flesh that was Emmett McCarthy. All three of them had come back from working on railroads in Gatlinburg when they'd heard news of their youngest brother's disappearance. It was clear that he'd died in some sort of animal attack, a bear attack, most guessed, while he'd been on the hunt for game for his family.

The brothers stayed home for a week for Emmett's funeral, which caught fire and burned their brother's body in the casket, and, unluckily, when the brothers went back to Gatlinburg, they found their jobs at the railroad taken.

The family struggled to support itself, until the young sister, who'd only been fourteen when her brother had died, caught the eye of a wealthy, kind, man. He married her, and gave an allowance to her family, so they could stay alive. She was happy with her husband, and they had several children. Two of her brothers married, as well, and started families of their own. The last, the eldest, became a fur trapper, specializing in hunting bears. For Emmett McCarthy, he would always say, when asked why he did what he did, and nothing more.

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_Jasper Whitlock and Mary Alice Brandon_

She woke up alone, with only the vision of a golden-haired, red-eyed vampire to accompany her. His name, as she would later learn, was Jasper, and she was Alice.

She waited twenty-eight years for him, until he finally found her in a diner in Philadelphia.

He left Maria and the Southern Wars with his friends, Peter and Charlotte, but depression and death haunted him at every turn. He left them to travel on his own, and that was when he found her.

They became nomads, wandering the earth the way most vampires did. They never found a way to cure the depression Jasper felt whenever he killed a human, but they were able to mitigate it with the positive emotions he always felt when around her.

In 1969, twenty-one years after they met, they went to Europe. It was then that they were found by the Volturi, who'd only heard rumors from vampires who'd met vampires who'd met Alice and Jasper about the pair, the seer and the empath. They offered cloaks for the two of them, dark ones nearly as black as the ancients', equal in color only to the infamous witch twins. Influenced by Chelsea's gift, searching for a purpose in life, the two accepted.

They never became very close to any of the guard members, mostly sticking to themselves, until a shielding vampire named Isabella became part of the guard, in 2005. Alice and Bella became like sisters, or as close to ones as human-drinking vampires could be, while Jasper and Bella enjoyed a friendly relationship, too. Bella didn't have a mate, since the one she'd loved most was a shapeshifter she would never see again, and the two tried to make her feel like the third wheel as little as possible.

Two hundred years later, in the year 2252, the Hybrid Wars began.

An immortal named Joham, who had escaped the notice of the Volturi for at least five hundred years, began his coup, assisted by his human-vampire hybrid children and all others who had been wronged by the Volturi. Alice hadn't seen it coming, because the dhampirs had the unique property of being invisible to her second sight. That would prove to be her downfall.

Two years into the war, in a battle in a deserted part of Russia, the Volturi forces were overwhelmed. Every dark-cloaked member of the guard who was at that battle died, including Alice, Jasper, Felix, Demetri, and Alec, whose gift had not been fast enough to keep the determined vampires and hybrids from killing him. They all burned.

The Hybrid Wars would end in 2271, after significant losses to both sides, with a Volturi victory, but the vampire world would never be the same.

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_Isabella Marie Swan (and Jacob Black)_

If it hadn't been for the kiss, everything would have been different.

She'd moved back to Forks, Washington to live with her father, during her junior year of high school. Though she'd been the object of fascination for a few weeks when she'd first moved there, she later drifted apart from her classmates and got closer to a group of friends in La Push, instead, including her childhood friend Jacob Black. She was there, too, when everything changed.

A trio of nomadic vampires were in the region, and the Quileute boys who encountered their scents started phasing into wolves, including the three boys of the girl's friend group. One of them imprinted on a young girl, and immediately broke up with his long-time girlfriend. Distressed, the girlfriend asked Jacob to kiss her, as an experiment. Neither noticed the girl, who had slowly fallen for Jacob, in the trees behind them. The moment she saw their lips touch, the girl ran off.

Nothing would have happened, if it hadn't been for the nomads. One had been attracted to the girl's scent, and interested by the challenge the wolves provided by guarding the girl. It was a boring end to the game, he thought, when he ended up finding her alone, sobbing, in the woods. He dragged her death out, a fatal mistake, because by then the wolves' attention had been attracted. They killed him, but not before he managed to bite the brown-eyed girl.

Some had wanted to kill her. The large grey wolf almost attacked his russet-furred brother for defending her, and, in the end, Jacob formed his own pack to protect her. The relations between the two packs would remain strained for a long time.

She woke up three days later with an incredible burning in her throat. Knowing no other way, she killed a human to relieve it. She tried to feed on only obvious criminals in large cities afterward, because they believed that there was no other choice. She tried to get them to kill her, but he refused. She was still her, he insisted, and her transformation hadn't been up to her.

Despite everything, despite her deadly diet and the natural tensions between them, the girl and the wolf remained close. When murders began to rock the city of Seattle, only a little while away, they knew immediately what was happening. Another new vampire was killing, uncontrolled, in Seattle. At the girl's insistence, Jacob's pack began making plans to hunt it down. To their surprise, they found many newborn vampires in Seattle, and something else.

He had sent four of his guard to contain the obvious army in Seattle, with one of his prized weapons leading the way. The seer girl had gotten nervous when she'd lost her second sight in Seattle, and her mate, the leader's first choice for his experience, had refused to go. The tiny female, who lead the offensive, would have killed all the giant hounds, and the newborn girl who stood beside her, but her brother had insisted that their master would want to meet her, the girl who stood despite his sister's burning attacks. When the newborn girl had refused, and it became clear that their gifts wouldn't work on any of them, he signaled for the largest vampire to seize the smallest wolf, a sandy-colored young one. He threatened the wolf's death if the newborn didn't come with them. She complied.

They took the sandy wolf with them, to ensure the girl's cooperation. As the boy had expected, his master was extremely pleased. He trained the girl individually, getting her to lower her mental shield so his bonds-infuencer could tie the girl to his coven. They released the sandy wolf once she did so.

The girl was still lonely, beyond anything else. She'd lost the wolf-boy whom she loved, as well as all her friends, until a tiny black-haired vampire sought her out, seeing that the two of them would be friends. She and her mate became the girl's sole companions, and, for a long time, it was just the two of them.

Two hundred years later, Joham's coup began. To her horror, the shielding girl lost her two friends early on in the war, in a battle they'd lost. The final offensive, an attack on Volterra, became the deciding factor. The girl was determined that their side would win, for her friends' sake. It was her sacrifice that made the Volturi victory possible, and everyone knew it. Even the witch girl, who'd always been jealous of her master's attention to the shiled, mourned her, and acknowledged that she'd helped avenge the death of the tiniest member's brother.

As for the girl, her final thoughts had been of happiness. After a long life without love, she was finally going to see her friends, her wolf, who she was pretty sure had died of old age at least a hundred years ago. She was glad she'd thought of love, before she burned. Isabella Marie Swan, the last survivor of the family-that-could-have-been, perished in 2271. Alone.

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Eight lives, linked though most would never meet. If things had turned out a bit differently, they could have become a family. They could have lived happily ever after. As the seer knew very well, the slightest change, the smallest decision, could change everything. They all shared one thing in common thing, though. They all burned.


End file.
